Abstract

This article analyzes the racialized subjectivities created by the Temuco bypass. This infrastructure project saw the rerouting of Route 5 (the Chilean section of the Pan-American Highway) through protected indigenous Mapuche lands in the 1990s and early 2000s. The government promoted this project as an emblematic example of success in multicultural negotiation; however, Mapuche leaders and protests along Route 5 represented it as one more case in a long history of state policies reducing indigenous protected lands. Exploring documents published by the Ministry of Public Works, state laws and decrees, written press, conclusions of Mapuche congresses, the documentary film Bypass Temuco: Ta i & ntilde; newentumun by Esteban Villarroel, and material traces along Route 5, the article argues that the Temuco bypass provides an example of neoliberal multicultural policy that creates a racialized boundary between a sanctioned indigeneity and its excluded Other. The state uses these subjectivities as a governmentality strategy where multiculturalism integrates indigenous populations (only) as cultural differences susceptible to being commodified, while actively marginalizing non-conforming groups. Roadblocks in the area, conversely, challenge this boundary, revealing the failures of this integrationist narrative and exposing Route 5's disconnects in material, cultural, and political terms.